Will the Electric Grid Become Optional? A Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) report identifies when and where solar-plus-battery electric generation systems could enable affordable customer defection from utilities. For years, low-cost solar-plus-battery electric generation systems were seen as a remote possibility. Those systems were considered fringe technology and not likely to threaten mainstream electric delivery “any time soon.” The limiting factor was high battery costs. Now, because of a confluence of factors playing across the energy industry, affordable battery storage is coming sooner than most folks forecast and that approaching day, [(now in some cases), and only 10 years hence in others], of low cost battery storage, when combined with solar PV, will alter the electric generation and delivery landscape. Solar-plus-battery/electric grid-parity is already here in Hawaii for commercial customers and will rapidly expand to residential customers in less than a decade. And, grid-parity will reach millions of commercial and residential customers in other high-cost utilities locations like New York and California, likely within a decade. Even before total grid-defection becomes widely economic, utilities will see solar-plus-battery systems eat into their revenues. Factors such as their customer’s desire for increased power reliability and low-carbon electric generation are driving early-adopters. And some say early-adopter activities will accelerate the infamous utility company death-spiral (UDS). [UDS is caused by the electric generation industry’s unrelenting, increasing prices and is the circumstance which makes electric-grid-defection economic more quickly.] Because grid-parity arrives within the 30-year economic life of typical utility power assets the days are numbered for traditional utility business models. The “old cost recovery model” based on kWh sales where utilities recover costs plus an allowed market return on infrastructure investments will become obsolete. Utilities (CSU) must re-think their current business model in order to retain customers and to capture the additional value that such distributed investments will bring. *This article was posted by Leia Guccione from the Rocky Mountain Institute on March 06, 2014 and was edited by Tim Leigh, former Board Member Colorado Springs Utilities. Please weigh-in on the CSU debate. Keep Drake? Knock it down? Join the conversation!
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 21:31:56 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015